concentration camps See also GUlag; see Map 31 for sites of principal concentration camps.

Concentration camps were one of the most important instruments of terror in Nazi Germany. Forecast by Hitler as early as 1921, they were first employed in 1933. At first German political opponents of National Socialism became ‘persons in protective custody’, to be joined from 1939 by people from all German-occupied territories. ‘Protective custody’, a measure employed by the Nazi police organizations, was detention without trial which gave no consideration to the due process of law.

1933–4

Immediately Hitler came to power in January 1933 the SA (Sturmabteilung, or Storm Detachment), the paramilitary organization known as the Brownshirts, created several hundred small detention centres in cellars and other places. Then in March they set up the first larger camps at Nohra in Thuringia and Oranienburg in Prussia, while the SS and Bavarian Political Police opened the Dachau camp the same month. By that autumn the Prussian state concentration camps of Sonnenburg, Lichtenburg, Börgermoor, Esterwegen, and Brandenburg were established, as was the Sachsenburg camp in Saxony. Between March 1933 and August 1934 up to 80,000 people were imprisoned.

In May 1934 the SS took over the running of the concentration camps from the SA. Most of the original camps were closed and Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, appointed the former commandant of Dachau, Theodor Eicke, as Inspector of Concentration Camps with the job of reorganizing them. Eicke closed the last SA camps, standardized the administration of the others, and established the SS Death's Head formations, the concentration camp guards. From then on Eicke's Concentration Camp Inspection Office was responsible for the conditions in the camps while incarcerations and releases were effected by the Gestapo, which maintained its own Political Division in each camp. By June 1935 there were just five camps with approximately 3,500 prisoners: Esterwegen (322), Lichtenburg (706), Moringen (49 women), Dachau (about 1,800), and Sachsenburg (678).

1935–9

In 1935 Hitler approved the expansion of the SS Death's Head formations and the construction of five new large camps. Preventive Gestapo raids, especially against communists, but also against so-called ‘anti-social’ persons such as gypsies and persons with a minor criminal record as well as professional criminals, led to a significant increase in the number of prisoners. Thus, on 1 November 1936 there were already 4,761 prisoners, and after the pogroms against the German Jews of November 1938 more than 50,000, but by April 1939 these numbers had decreased again, to 21,000. In addition to ‘combating enemies of the state’ the concentration camps now had a further, initially secondary, task: exploitation of the forced labour of their prisoners. New camp sites were now no longer selected solely by previous criteria such as seclusion and good transport routes, but also for their proximity to SS factories.

The first of these new large camps arose in Sachsenhausen near Berlin in July 1936. This took in the prisoners from the former Esterwegen camp and from the end of 1936 to the end of 1938 the numbers of prisoners there rose from 2,000 to exceed 8,000. In the summer of 1937, Buchenwald camp was set up near Weimar in Thuringia, and the camps in Sachsenburg and Lichtenburg were closed. Buchenwald was planned for 3,000 prisoners at first, later for 12,000. At the same time the Dachau camp was considerably expanded. Following the Anschluss (union) of Austria with Germany in the spring of 1938, Mauthausen camp was set up near Linz. A decisive factor in the choice of this site, as for Flossenbürg camp which was built at the same time, was the proximity of large stone quarries in which the prisoners were forced to work, often until they dropped. For female prisoners, who were initially confined in Moringen and later in Lichtenburg, the Ravensbrück camp was built to accommodate several thousand prisoners. These projects completed Eicke's system of concentration camps; after this he commanded the SS Death's Head Division until his death on the Eastern Front in 1943; he was succeeded in November 1939, by Richard Glücks, who retained the position of Inspector of Concentration Camps until 1945.

A standard concentration camp such as Dachau was divided into five departments. Department I comprised the commandant and his staff; Department II was the Political Department, headed by a Gestapo officer; Department III, headed by a senior SS officer, was responsible for camp conditions and for selecting of SS Block Leaders and key inmates who exercised unlimited authority in the camp. Department IV was the administration; and Department V was the medical staff. The guard units, the SS Death's Head formations, were in a separate chain of command and were only under the tactical command of the camp commandant. From 1940 all concentration camps were part of the Waffen-SS.

1939–41

With the German invasion of Poland (seePolish campaign) the number of prisoners in the camps rose dramatically. New camps were built at Neuengamme near Hamburg ( 1940), at Stutthof near Danzig ( 1941), at Gross-Rosen near Breslau ( 1941), and at Natzweiler in Alsace ( 1941). Auschwitz near Cracow and Majdanek near Lublin, first planned as prisoner-of-war (POW) camps, later became both concentration and extermination camps. Not included among the concentration camps were the extermination camps of OPERATION REINHARD in which from the end of 1941 the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of European Jews began.

1942–4

The prisoners, of whom only a minority were Germans by now, no longer worked in SS factories, but provided slave labour for the entire German armaments industry. Himmler wanted to set up factories in the camps, but was not able to prevail against the armaments minister, Albert Speer, who preferred a number of small camps near munitions factories. In the following years well over 1,000 satellite camps were set up.

This new phase also made itself apparent in the organization of the camps. In March 1942 the Concentration Camp Inspection Office was integrated as Group D into the SS Main Office of Economy and Administration directed by Oswald Pohl. From then on, the factories ordered prisoners directly from Group D, and the concentration camps charged the firms for the slave labour, the money being collected by the SS for the Reich ministry of finance.

After the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 (see BARBAROSSA) the number of prisoners increased again. Following Hitler's commissar order, thousands of Soviet officers were murdered in the camps, more than 22,000 in Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald alone. Several thousand other Soviet enlisted men and officers starved in the winter of 1941–2 in specially isolated barracks which were given the cryptic name ‘POW work camps’. Some camps included special enclosures (Sonder lager) for prominent prisoners. Stalin's son was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen before his murder, as were the former Austrian chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg, Hitler's would-be assassin Georg Elser, and some prominent Allied POW in Dachau.

In a few camps, especially in Auschwitz and Dachau, the SS and the Luftwaffe conducted medical experiments on inmates which were generally fatal (see Mengele and medicine). The SS also selected sick inmates in all camps under the codename ‘Aktion 14 f 13’ who where then killed with poison gas as part of the euthanasia programme.

In 1942–3 other camps were taken over by the SS as concentration camps. These included ones at Riga, Kauen, and Vaivara in Ostland as well as the Krankenlager (sick camp) Bergen-Belsen used exclusively for Jewish prisoners. At the same time from 1942 to 1944 more than a million Jews were murdered with the gas zyklon-B in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

In 1944 the network of concentration camps reached its zenith. Parts of the armaments industry were moved below ground. Flossenbürg prisoners produced aircraft for Messerschmitt underground, and Neuengamme prisoners set up gigantic factory complexes in the caves of Porta Westfalica. In October 1944 the Dora-Mittelbau camp near Nordhausen in the Harz mountains, until then a satellite command of Buchenwald, was converted into an independent camp. Here, components for the V-weapons were produced under unimaginable conditions.

Since 1939 the number of registered camp prisoners had risen from 25,000 to 60,000 (end of 1941), 98,600 ( July 1942), more than 200,000 ( May 1943), to about 225,000 ( August 1943). From July 1942 to June 1943 alone, more than 110,000 died in the camps, which does not include the prisoners executed or brought into the camps for execution. This corresponds to a death rate of over 10% which, after a temporary decrease at the end of 1943, was to climb still higher in 1944–5. Malnutrition and hunger, epidemics, and mass murder marked daily life in the camps. On 15 January 1945 the SS had 511,537 male and 202,674 female prisoners registered in the concentration camps.

1944–5

The last phase of the concentration camps was characterized by chaos and mass death. In July 1944 Majdanek was liberated by Soviet troops. The closer the Allied forces came to the German border, the more frantically the SS attempted to herd prisoners from the threatened areas into the middle of Germany. In January 1945 probably more than 60,000 prisoners were sent on forced marches towards Dachau, Buchenwald, Gross-Rosen, and Mauthausen. At least 15,000 of them died or were shot on the way. In all camps, especially in Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück, many weak prisoners were singled out to be killed with injections or gas. About 7,000 prisoners of the Neuengamme camp were put on ships in the Bay of Lübeck which were then attacked and sunk by British aircraft. Buchenwald was liberated on 11 April 1945, Bergen-Belsen on 15 April, and Dachau on 30 April. The pictures of the people whom the American and British troops found there, starving or dead, revealed the full extent of the Nazi terror to the world at large for the first time. In Bergen-Belsen alone, 34,000 people died between February 1945 and the liberation, after which another 13,000 died by the end of June 1945 despite all the medical efforts of the British troops. Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, and Dachau became synonyms for the inhuman dictatorship of National Socialism.

The number of prisoners and dead in the concentration camps can only be estimated approximately. Altogether, there were 1,600,000 registered prisoners and 450,000 deaths are documented, though a number exceeding 600,000 dead is more probable. However this does not include the victims of the Final Solution in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chelmno, and Majdenek, and in the extermination camps of Operation REINHARD.

Johannes Tuchel

Bibliography

Kogon, E. , The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System Behind Them (New York, 1950).
Pingel, F. , Häftlinge unter SS-Herrschaft. Widerstand, Selbstbehauptung und Vernichtung im Konzentrationslager (Hamburg, 1978).
Tuchel, J. , Konzentrationslager. Organizationsgeschichte und Funktion der ‘Inspektion der Konzentrationslager’ 1934–1938 (Boppard, 1991).

Concentration Camps

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The concentration camp has become a paradigmatic symbol for oppression of the racial or ethnic “other.” The Oxford Dictionary defines a concentration camp as “a camp where non-combatants of a district are accommodated.” While this definition captures the basic description it does not articulate that concentration camps have become synonymous with starvation, rape, torture, violence, and mass extermination. Some camps also involve forced labor in addition to the other forms of inhumane treatment. Many states—Western and non-Western, democratic and undemocratic—have used concentration camps as tools to target civilian populations and hated ethnic groups. The justification for camps has generally been to cleanse the society of perceived internal threats to security and order. In most cases a distinct ethnic group or class of people is determined to be a threat and subject to internment by state decree in order to guarantee stability and prevent insurgency. Thus the development of concentration camps is driven in its earliest form as a counterinsurgency technique against anticolonial struggles.

The first use of concentration camps was by the British during the Boer war (1899–1902). Boers and black Africans were placed in camps so that they would be unable to aid Boer guerrillas. It is reported that more than 27,000 Boers and 14,000 Africans died in the camps from disease and starvation. Most of the dead were children, clearly noncombatants in the conflict. The British also employed the use of concentration camps in Namibia, the Isle of Man, Cyprus, Kenya, Channel Islands, and Northern Ireland. In Kenya during the Mau-Mau rebellion the British placed 1.5 million Kikuyu rebels in concentration camps. More than 300,000 Kenyans died as a result of these policies. These cases make it clear that even when concentration camps are not explicitly designed to exterminate large portions of the enemy population they are no less deadly in their effect.

Camps have almost always been justified by and surrounded conflicts whether civil or international. Some of the most notable examples have surrounded multinational conflicts like World Wars I (1914–1918) and II (1939–1945). During World War I, Austria-Hungary placed Serbs and Ukranians in concentration camps during the war. However, the most prominent examples emerge from the experience of World War II.

The experience of Nazi Germany in World War II stands as the paradigmatic example of concentration camps. The Nazi government led by Adolf Hitler and an ideology of cleansing the German nation and controlled territories of Non-Aryans, developed camps for mass extermination and forced labor. The primary groups targeted by Germans were Jews from Germany and territories occupied by Germany during World War II like the Netherlands, France, and Poland. However, while the Nazi camps are known for their extermination of Jews they were not the only populations placed in camps. Nazis also placed the Roma (Gypsies), Africans, homosexuals, and communists in camps for forced labor and extermination.

The Nazi camps first began in 1933 largely for internment but were converted to the cause of extermination in 1941. Evidence shows that more than six million Jews and some unknown others perished in the Nazi camps of Treblinka, Belzec, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Sobibor. Methods of extermination included starvation, gas chambers, disease, and firing squads. According to some sources groups of individuals were used at times as target practice for German soldiers.

The Nazi concentration camp spawned immense creativity and social scientific work. Psychologist Viktor Frankl developed his psychological perspective called logotherapy based upon his experiences in Auschwitz and Dachau. Italian theorist Giorgio Agamben has developed theories around the state of exception and the bare life to see the concentration camp as a product of modern state sovereignty rather than as an aberration. Italians also placed Jews and communists into camps during World War II and camps also existed in the Netherlands and France.

However, Germany and Italy were not the only nations to use internment during World War II. The United States put ethnic Japanese, many of who were American citizens, into what were called internment camps beginning in 1942. This action was undertaken by the Roosevelt administration under executive order 9066 following the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan in December of 1941. More than 120,000 Japanese Americans and some German Americans, two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens, were placed in internment camps. Lt. General J. L. DeWitt wrote in a letter to the Chief of Staff, U.S. Army, June 5, 1943, that, “The security of the Pacific Coast continues to require the exclusion of Japanese from the area now prohibited to them and will so continue as long as that military necessity exists” (p. vii).

Many Japanese died or suffered poor health and neglect in the camps. In order to leave the camps young men had to swear allegiance to the United States and agree to enter the U.S. military. Many refused and were punished, and their stories are captured in the novel The No, No Boys (1978)[MS1] referring to their decline of swearing allegiance to the U.S. and their decline of military conscription. In 1988 the U.S. Congress formally apologized to Japanese American victims of internment camps and granted reparations to the group according to the Japanese-American Reparation Act.

Japanese internment is not the only instance in the United States of the perceived use of what many identify as concentration camps. The practice of placing Native Americans on Indian reservations that had few services and little or no economic opportunities has been likened to the practice of concentration camps. The Native American experience begins with the Indian Removal Act of 1838, which relocated Southern tribes east of the Mississippi River and set the stage for moving them to reservations. Others like Stanley Elkins in his work on slavery compared slave plantations to concentration camps.

In the twenty-first century the detention and torture of terror suspects and so-called illegal combatants outside of the Geneva conventions at “Camp X-Ray” in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has been likened to concentration camps. Detainees have been subjected to a range of forms of extralegal torture that do not conform to the Geneva Conventions or other international law.

Latin America has not been free from the experience of concentration camps. The military junta in Argentina used camps to torture and kill more than 30,000 disappeared dissidents between 1976 and 1983 during what is called the “Dirty War.” The military regime of Augusto Pinochet (1915–2006) in Chile also used similar camps to deal with dissidents during its reign following the coup against democratically elected leftist President Salvador Allende (1908–1973).

Between 1895 and 1898 the Spanish in Cuba employed camps to combat the insurgents fighting for Cuban independence. The atrocities in the camps, the bombing of the Maine, as well as the imperialist designs of the United States are cited as reasons the United States invaded Cuba in the Spanish-American War (1898). The Spanish also used camps in the Philippines in 1901 to quell descent against colonial rule.

Other uses of the concentration camp have involved the Khmer Rouge regime headed by Pol Pot (1925–1998) in Cambodia, North Korea, and the Peoples Republic of China reform and labor camps. The camps in Cambodia caused the deaths of 1.7 million enemies of the Khmer Rouge (1975–1979); the camps in North Korea held 1.6 million enemies of the state (1948–1994); and countless millions in the camps in China developed during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution (1958–1961 and 1966–1969). In each case, these were communist regimes that used camps to “reform” political dissidents or those who were perceived to be ideological or ethnic enemies of the regime. In each case, thousands died in camps from starvation or from overwork or were executed. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin (1878–1953) used concentration camps called gulags to address political dissenters, Jews, and other ethnic groups in Russia. These camps included Trotskeyite political foes, and ethnic Ukranians, Chechens, Inguish, Crimean Tartars, Tajiks, Bashkirs, and Kazaks.

One of the more recent experiences with concentration camps was the Balkan War, following the break-up of Yugoslavia. In Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995 more than 200,000 Croats, Serbs, and Muslim were killed in camps and by acts of ethnic cleansing.

The widespread use of concentration camps for social scientists demonstrates the willingness of various kinds of states in different contexts to engage in this harsh form of population regulation. The camps themselves demonstrate the extensive power of modern states to regulate all aspects of everyday life for citizens and other populations contained within national, colonial, or imperial boundaries. Camps have also provided opportunities to understand the psychology of the oppressors and the oppressed. The concept of authoritarian personality was developed in part to understand the participation of regular Nazi soldiers in the extermination of Jews. Further, the works of Stanley Elkins, Avery Gordon, Agamben, and Frankl, among others, examine the effects of camps on individuals and groups. Beyond psychology, notions of collective memory and haunting have also been developed to analyze the way the experience of concentration camps structures the lives and memories of generations beyond the initial victims. Concentration camps are a devastating product of modern nation states and civil and international military conflicts. At the same time, they are a rich but disturbing area of study for those who seek to understand the role of the state and the psychology of violence and oppression.

SEE ALSO Colonialism; Contempt; Genocide; Hitler, Adolf; Holocaust, The; Imperialism; Imprisonment; Incarceration, Japanese American; Jews; Nazism; Personality, Authoritarian; Reparations

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.

Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. State of Exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Elkins, Stanley. 1968. Slavery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Frankl, Viktor. 1997. Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy. New York: Touchstone.

Gordon, Avery. 1997. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Lt. Gen. J. L. DeWitt to the Chief of Staff, U.S. Army, June 5, 1943. 1943. In Final Report; Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast 1942. pp. vii–x. Washington DC: Government Printing Office.

Mark Sawyer

concentration camps These large prison camps were first used in Cuba (1896), and in the Boer War, when around 160,000 Boers were interned, around 30,000 of whom died. However, it was in Nazi Germany that they were systematically used, first to imprison opponents of the regime but increasingly also during the Holocaust to imprison and murder those whom Nazi ideology considered ‘undesirable’, in particular Jews, but also Jehovah's Witnesses, priests, homosexuals, gypsies, and the mentally ill. Since Hitler's ideology was founded and focused upon the hatred of Jews and Bolsheviks (i.e. Communists), two groups which he considered to be synonymous, the German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 heralded a new phase in the mass murder of Jews in all of German-occupied Europe. New camps were built, including six ‘extermination camps’, whose sole purpose was the killing of Jews. The German drive to kill all Jews was given its final sanction in the Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942. Although the mass killing of Jews was already under way, a number of SS leaders and high-ranking Nazi officials met in Berlin to approve the Endlösung (final solution) to what they considered to be the ‘Jewish problem’, in effect their mass murder. In the following years, the Nazis were ruthlessly effective at carrying out their plans. It is estimated that of a total of around seven million interned persons, only around 500,000 people survived.

Auschwitz; Warsaw Ghetto; Warsaw Rising;

Table 5. Concentration camps 1933–1945^a

concentration camp Originally a place in which non-combatants were accommodated, as instituted by Lord KITCHENER during the Second Boer War (1899–1902). The Boers, mainly women and children, were placed there officially for their own protection from Kitchener's ‘scorched earth policy’ in the Transvaal and Cape Colony, but actually to prevent them from aiding the guerrillas. Some 20,000 detainees died, largely as a result of disease arising from unhygienic conditions.

During the NAZI regime in Germany (1933–45) concentration camps became places in which to intern unwanted persons, specifically JEWISH PEOPLE, but also Protestant and Catholic dissidents, communists, gypsies, trade unionists, homosexuals, and people with disabilities. Described by GOEBBELS in August 1934 as ‘camps to turn anti-social members of society into useful members by the most humane means possible’, they in fact came to witness depraved acts of torture, slave labour, horror, and mass murder on a scale unprecedented in any country in any century. Some 200,000 had been through the camps before World War II began, when they were increased in size and number. The camps (Konzetrazionslager, or KZ), administered by the ss, were categorized into Arbeitslager, where prisoners were organized into labour battalions, and Vernichtungslager, set up for the extermination and incineration of men, women, and children. In eastern Europe prisoners were used initially in labour battalions or in the tasks of genocide, until they too were exterminated. In such camps as Auschwitz, gas chambers could kill and incinerate 12,000 people daily. In the west, Belsen, Dachau, and Buchenwald (a forced labour camp where doctors conducted medical research on prisoners) were notorious. An estimated six million Jews died in the camps (the HOLOCAUST), as well as some half million gypsies; in addition, millions of Poles, Soviet prisoners-of-war, and other civilians perished. After the war many camp officials were tried and punished, but others escaped. Maidanek was the first camp to be liberated (by the Red Army, in July 1944). After 1953 West Germany paid $37 billion in reparations to the surviving Jewish victims of Nazism.

In the Soviet Union, Lenin greatly enlarged (1919) the Tzarist forced labour camps, which were renamed Gulags (Russian acronym for the Main Administration of Corrective Labour Camps) in 1930. An estimated 15 million prisoners were confined to the Gulags during Stalin's purges, of whom many succumbed to disease, famine, or the firing squad.

concentration camp a detention site outside the normal prison system created for military or political purposes to confine, terrorize, and, in some cases, kill civilians. The term was first used to describe prison camps used by the Spanish military during the Cuban insurrection (1868–78), those created by America in the Philippines (1898–1901), and, most widely, to refer to British camps built during the South African War (Boer War) to confine Afrikaners in the Transvaal and Cape Colony (1899—1902). The term soon took on much darker meanings. In the USSR, the Gulag elaborated on the concept beginning as early as 1920. After 1928, millions of opponents of Soviet collectivization as well as common criminals were imprisoned under extremely harsh conditions and many died.

During World War II concentration camps were established throughout Europe by the Nazis, and throughout Indochina and Manchuria by the Japanese. Of the millions of people of many nationalities detained in them, a large proportion died of mistreatment, malnutrition, and disease. In both Nazi and Japanese camps inmates were exploited for slave labor and medical experimentation, but the Nazis also established extermination camps. In the best known of these—Majdanek, Treblinka, and Oświęcim (Auschwitz), in Poland—more than six million mainly Jewish men, women, and children were killed in gas chambers. Among the most notorious Nazi camps liberated by U.S. and British troops in 1945 were Buchenwald, Dachau, and Bergen-Belsen.

The term has also been applied to the U.S. relocation centers for American citizens of Japanese origin and others interned in the W United States during World War II. In China during the Cultural Revolution (1966–69) millions were sent to euphemistically named "reeducation" camps, and in Cambodia after Pol Pot came to power (1976) an estimated one million civilians died in "reeducation" camps. North Korea maintains a system of political and criminal prison camps in which inmates are sentenced to harsh physical labor and are underfed and mistreated. In 1992, reports of malnutrition and killings in concentration camps for Muslim, Croat, and Serb male civilians in Bosnia led to attempts by international organizations to identify the location of the camps and inspect them.

concentration camp Detention centre for military or political prisoners. The first were set up by the British for Afrikaner civilians during the South African Wars (1899–1902). The most notorious were established by the German Nazi regime in the 1930s for political opponents, and people considered racially or socially undesirable. Some of these camps provided slave labour while others were the sites of mass execution. In Poland, more than 6 million people (mostly Jews) were murdered in the gas chambers. Gulags were widely employed during Stalin's purges, and reeducation camps were used in the Chinese Cultural Revolution and by the Khmer Rouge. See also Auschwitz; Belsen; Buchenwald; Dachau

con·cen·tra·tion camp • n. a place where large numbers of people, esp. political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities, are deliberately imprisoned to provide forced labor or to await mass execution. The term is most strongly associated with the camps established by the Nazis.